Category: Daily Life

It’s been unusually warm outside this week and we slept with the window open last night.  It was delightful!

The cats actually stood in line to jump onto the windowsill and smell the fresh air.  We booted them out before we went to sleep and enjoyed the cool air all night long.

I know that the threat of winter weather still looms – we’ve had big ice storms later in March than this before – but it’s still a wonderful treat to get this glimpse of spring.

I need to talk my lunch companions into going someplace where we can sit outside today…

Today I bought my daily Red Bull from the vending machine at work and as I rinsed off the top under the sink and carefully dried it off with a paper towel, I realized that I’d picked up that finicky habit from my dad.  I could almost hear him saying, "You don’t know where it’s been."

Of course, family members influence us in lots of ways that become so blended into our everyday behavior that it’s difficult to trace their origins.

When I make a bed, I put the fitted sheet over the mattress starting with one lower corner, then move on to the upper corner that’s diagonal from it, for no other reason than it’s the way my mother taught me to do it.

I have no doubt that I still tie my shoes exactly the way my aunt and her cousin taught me to when I was a child.

I can’t have even a brief conversation with my sister without picking
up her speech patterns and certain phrases.  I’m sure that’s why we
sound so much alike on the phone – to the extent that we used to trade
the phone back and forth as teenagers to fool each others’ boyfriends.

How are influences from your family members still reflected in the way you do things today?

Last night I had a very satisfactory evening, even though I got home from work a little later than usual.

I’d had a $100 gift card burning a hole in my pocket since December, so my husband and I decided to go out for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory (I know, I know).  I chose my favorite pasta dish and carefully portioned it out so I would have enough leftovers for Wednesday’s lunch and also enough room in my stomach for a piece of cheesecake. 

We thought about using some of the remaining credit to go to a movie, but then remembered that tomorrow is cleaning day and the house was a mess.  We waddled to the car and went home to tackle the chaos.

I looked around at the mounds of dirty pots and pans, the baskets of clean but wrinkled laundry and the piles of junk mail on the counter and decided I needed something to elevate my mood before I got started.

I went up to my office and loaded my iPod with the songs my band does (both originals and covers) and a few extras just for my own entertainment.  I’m learning three new songs for this coming weekend’s band practice.  You’ll get a good snapshot of just how random our song selection is when I tell you that the three artists whose songs we’re adding to the set are Iron Maiden, Rush and Kelly Clarkson.

Anyway, once I had music piped directly into my ears, I was able to crank up my efficiency level and clear out the worst of the clutter and mess in the public portions of the house.  The guest room has been lost for the time being; I think it’s going to take a weekend and a lot of rearranging to figure out what to do with all the stuff we’ve been ditching in there.  Once we fully reclaim the room and can afford to do some light remodeling, I want to get this to put in there.

For this weekend, I’m supposed to think of some more songs to suggest to the band, but I’m having trouble coming up with ideas.  I was about to suggest Jane Child’s "Mona Lisa Smile," but it’s rather dirty and I hate to take the chance that I might end up performing it in earshot of anyone in my life who might be shocked.

I guess I’ll have to run through my CD and record collections and see if anything jumps out at me.  (My extensive collection of recordings on vinyl is the most glaring evidence that I’m more than half a decade older than my bandmates.  I need to stop mentioning it at practice.)

If you have any suggestions of rock, hard rock or heavy metal songs from the late ’70s to present that we could do, please pass them along!  In those genres, I don’t really have an upper limit on vocal range but I discovered at our last practice that Stone Temple Pilots is too low for me.  Let that be your guide.

On Saturday, I went to a birthday party for a two-year-old.  I was the only person there without children.  I lasted for two hours and then had to go home and take a nap.  I don’t know how parents do it.

That evening, my husband and I went out to see three bands play.  We met up with some of my co-workers beforehand and chatted for a while, then went to the bar and stayed until it closed.  It was a lot of fun to get out into the local music scene as a spectator rather than a participant, for once.  I hope we start doing that more often.

The next day was my nephew’s first birthday party, which started at 11:30 a.m.  Does it reflect poorly on me as an aunt if I reveal that I arrived with a bar stamp on my hand and the lingering smell of smoke in my hair?  11:30 is pretty darned early to make it half an hour across town when you didn’t get to bed until 2 a.m.

Between all the social events and running a ton of errands over the weekend, I kind of wish I could have another day off.  I think that feeling haunted my subconscious overnight because I had a stress dream about being late to work and missing an important meeting.

The good news is that this week isn’t quite as overscheduled as usual.  I have a lot to do at work, but the evenings are mostly free.  I’m sure I can catch up on my sleep within a day or so.  Now I just need to take the time to do some of the housework I’ve been neglecting…

Yesterday my grandfather passed away, just three months after my grandmother.  He had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease even longer than my grandmother had, so it had been a number of years since I’d seen him and been sure he knew who I was.  Perhaps the only good thing to come from traveling to Florida for my grandmother’s funeral is that I got to see and talk to my grandfather one last time.

In 2002, when I compiled a list of my favorite memories to send to my grandparents, I included these things I remembered about my grandfather as I was growing up:

I remember…

• Trying to learn how to swing a golf club, courtesy of lessons by Golf Pro Grandpa in your front yard.  Sadly, I’m no better at golfing now than I was then.
• Riding around in your 1932 Plymouth Roadster with you.  Later, I remember learning to drive a stick shift in it.  The gears were very forgiving, which was wonderful for a driver with my lack of skill at the time.  I still prefer a manual transmission, and all my cars have been stick shift ever since.
• Marveling at the tricks you taught Poco.  I especially liked the one where he flipped a dry-roasted peanut off his nose and caught it in his mouth.  Poco didn’t like children, but we still thought he was a Wonder Dog for his great tricks.
• Going to watch you perform with your barbershop quartet.
• The "happy dance" you did every Christmas, immortalized on each year’s Super 8 film.
• Riding on your motorcycle.  Even though we went really, really slowly and not particularly far, it was a huge thrill, mainly because my parents did not approve.
• One dinner we had together at Shoney’s Restaurant.  We spent almost the entire meal discussing correct grammar.  I have no doubt that you’re the progenitor of my "Mad Grammarian" impulses.

Thank you, Grandpa, for sharing your appreciation for old cars, language, singing, Tom Lehrer records, cranberry juice, Oreo cookies, driving and reading.

Well, I lived through the staff meeting on Wednesday morning.  I’d be lying if I said I slept soundly the night before.  However, when the time came, I put on my long, red wig, bandana, backwards baseball cap, sunglasses and fringed leather jacket and just went for it. 

The song started, I waited until just before the vocals kicked in, and then I ran out and high-fived everyone in the first row while lip-synching the song.  I made it through the minute-and-a-half of song, pacing around in front of all my co-workers and trying to remember what the lyrics were.  Frankly, I have no memory of what kind of reaction it got at the time.  There’s a video of it on our intranet, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to steel myself to watch it.

Afterward, everyone was quite complimentary.  Women, especially, seemed to give me major props for gutsiness.  Other people didn’t realize it was me, or have been slowly figuring it out in the meantime.

I was painfully shy as a child, but I seem to get bolder and bolder with each passing year.   These days, I’m almost embarrassment-proof.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but social gaffes can’t hurt me.  Does that happen to everyone as they get older?

The other day at band practice, something terrible happened.  I pulled my PDA out of my purse to make a note of the next practice date and made the tragic discovery that it had somehow reset itself back to factory default.  All my information was gone:  contacts, calendar, notes, everything.

I have no idea how it happened.  I doubt I’d be able to do it on purpose if I wanted to.

If you’re thinking, "But fortunately she syncs her PDA to her computer," I’m sad to say that’s incorrect.  Ever since we did our last Outlook upgrade on my home computer, my pocket PC has refused to sync.  That means the PDA had months and months of stuff in it that had never been backed up on my computer.  I’d meant to try to figure out the problem, but I really don’t use my home machine that much, so it didn’t seem all that pressing.

Now I’m trying desperately to remember what information may have been lost.  I’m pretty sure I have a dentist’s appointment soon, so I need to call the office and find out when it is.  I hope I didn’t miss it already.  Frankly, I’m not 100% sure of the name of my dentist without my PDA to back me up, but I’m sure I can track him down somehow.

What will I do without my massage therapist’s new address, that note about what kind of port I like best for when I go to the liquor store, and the reminder that I agreed to bring goodie bag items to my next community board meeting?

I almost overbooked myself this Saturday and the following Saturday because I forgot about a birthday party and a bridal shower on those days.  It’s as though someone has taken out a vital portion of my brain.

This may be the time for me to switch to a web-based calendar like 30Boxes.  But I’d still like my calendar and contacts to be portable.  I guess I’ll start over again with the PDA and just keep my fingers crossed.

After Friday’s blog post, I went back to bed and slept pretty much all day long.  I woke up on Saturday morning feeling rested, although I still required four doses of Pepto-Bismol before I could go on with my day.

Band practice started at 4:00 p.m., so I figured I’d be up for it if I took it easy all day long.  I got dressed and noticed that my jeans fit loosely, even though I’d just gotten them out of the dryer.  Hmmm. 

My husband asked me how I felt.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because you look terrible," he said.  Wow, thanks for that.

I did have a pallor that any goth chick would envy, but I was feeling better, I thought.  Of course, once I got to practice, I realized that I hadn’t taken into account how much energy it takes to sing hard rock songs.  I stood in my usual spot for the first three songs, but after that I had to maneuver over to the edge of the couch so I could lean or sit.  I requested a break after the first ten songs so I could lie on the floor for a while and recuperate.

The band and I had a discussion about how incredibly difficult it must be for performers with a drug or alcohol addiction to go onstage and perform, considering how tough I was having it with just a little intestinal bug.  Our consensus:  just say no.

By the time I’d consumed my liter-and-a-half of water, I’d hydrated myself back to relative normalcy.  In fact, I even went out to dinner after practice and had a small meal.

On Sunday, I woke up almost back at square one.  I loaded up on OTC pharmaceuticals until I could safely move about.

I had promised to make a lasagna and a big pan of baked ziti to take to a Ronald McDonald House dinner that evening, so I forced myself to leave the house and go to the grocery store to get the ingredients.  I shuffled through the store like a zombie, picking up food items on my list.  I then numbly circled the produce section looking in vain for an eggplant, the last thing I needed for my ziti recipe.  I finally found a produce employee who spoke English and knew what an eggplant was.  He started to lead me to where the eggplants should be, then realized there were none there.  He checked the stockroom and returned to tell me that they were "waiting for a truck."
I, however, was in no mood to wait for the truck.

I went through the checkout line and put my groceries in the car.  Knowing that I had another grocery store stop ahead of me, I pried a bottle of Gatorade out of one of the bags and slugged down the whole thing.  It made me feel marginally better.  At the next store, I bought the world’s worst looking eggplant and a can of chicken noodle soup, then went home to eat the soup and try to find the will to prepare two enormous entrees.

Somehow I managed to successfully produce both dishes, drive across town with them, and socialize with my club members for an hour or so (although I didn’t eat). 

Today I’m pretty much back to normal.  I hadn’t had any caffeine for four days, so this morning’s green tea kind of made my heart race, but otherwise I think I’m fine.  However, I’ll NEVER be eating at the cafeteria across the street from my office again.

Sorry I didn’t post sooner, but I’ve been flat on my back all day long with a savage bout of food poisoning.  I don’t think I’ve been awake for more than 10 minutes at a time until now (except last night when I tossed and turned until dawn).

I’m eating a bowl of oatmeal in the hope that it will quell some of the acid that’s eating up my stomach.  Judging by the ominous rumbles my guts are making, my stomach is either saying "thank you" or giving me a dire warning.

I called my doctor’s office but they told me what I already knew:  this’ll just have to run its course.  I’ve had worse; I don’t think I’ll need to go to the emergency room for IV fluids this time.  Still, this isn’t how I wanted to spend my Friday and possibly my weekend.

/whining

I’ve always been interested in how people handle being known by different identities.  What’s it like to be a performer known widely by a professional name but in private by his or her real name? 

I remember working for a birth announcement company many years ago and typesetting baby announcements for the late Saturday Night Live actor Phil Hartman.  He ordered two sets of cards:  a large quantity with his named spelled "Hartman" and a smaller quantity with his name spelled "Hartmann," presumably for his family and close friends.

When I was younger, I used a stage name when I sang in bands.  Even my band members didn’t know my real name, although I would have told them if they’d asked.  Come to think of it, my own husband originally knew me by my stage name and only switched to calling me by my real name after we started dating seriously.

Interestingly, my husband is known by everyone except his relatives and childhood friends by a stage name he has used since he was in his early 20s.  That’s one of the reasons I didn’t change my name when we got married:  his real name doesn’t mean anything to me and I only ever see it on legal documents.

Just when I’d given up on alternate band identities (not to mention the faux by-lines I often had at a small magazine, designed to make it look as though they had more writers than they actually did), along came the blogosphere.  When I went to BlogHer last year, I had a difficult time deciding how to introduce myself.  Am I myself or one of my blog identities?  How do I smoothly include all those selves so that they’ll be remembered together?

It can be rather exhausting presenting different faces to the world depending upon the situation.  I used to compartmentalize my personality: I’d be one person at work, a slightly different person in my community service organization, and yet another person around my friends and bands. 

Over the past few years, I’ve started to remove those distinctions.  Now I’m pretty much just ME, in any setting.  What you see (or read) is what you get. 

How do the rest of you pseudonymous bloggers feel about the division between your blog identity and your real self?  Do you use other names in other contexts, too?  Are you the same person no matter what name you’re using?